Marie brews herself a cup of tea but doesn’t offer any to me, which is all right because my stomach’s in turmoil, like the first time in Ranger training when I slid out of an airplane. You’re miles up in the air, and you have your parachute and you’ve been told how to do this, and a part of you is excited just to do it, but you’re also scared out of your mind. There’s something unnatural about it, humans, with our dense bones and heavy muscles, tumbling into the air like that. We weren’t meant to fly, which means you’re just surrendering yourself to the expanse and trusting everything will work right.
I take a sip of water and force it down. Where to begin? When Cindy and me finally got together? When we found out she was pregnant and Judge and Mrs. Judge tried to convince her to terminate? When she got so mad at them she moved out to Lincoln’s to live with me? When, at the hospital, with her labor going on nineteen hours, she begged me to call her mother, and then it was Mrs. Judge there in the delivery room, her on one side of the hospital bed and me on the other, waiting for the baby to come, and somehow everything she’d said to Cindy, all those hurtful things about the both of us, was forgiven, abracadabra, gone?
Well. We have time. All night, and the way I see it, this will most likely be the last night I ever have company here in the cabin, so I start way back, at the beginning. My whole sad life story. How my mother woke up one morning when I was seven, kissed me on the forehead and said she’d be right back, but then loaded up two suitcases, climbed in the car, and drove off, never to be seen again. How she waved. How I waited and waited until night closed in and I put two waffles in the toaster and ate them with so much syrup it was like soup.
I tell Marie about growing up at Lincoln’s farm, about meeting Cindy in the eleventh grade. Me joining the Army and meeting Jake and serving in Afghanistan. Cindy going off to college. I explain how Cindy had been home for months by the time I got back, living at home and, in her own words, about to go crazy stuck there with her parents, who were constantly on her about what she intended to do with her life. For the time being, she was working at an art gallery and volunteering at the elementary school, and going back and forth about what to do next. Her parents felt strongly that she should pursue law school, but she was thinking about social work. Which her parents didn’t like at all: no money in that line of work, no gratitude, either.
Anyhow. I tell Marie that yes, I have considered the possibility that maybe part of the reason why me and Cindy ended up getting together was because she’d been there at home, bored and lonely and treading water, all of her friends having moved on, and I was there, and I didn’t care one bit about whether she became a lawyer. Believe me, I’ve considered all that, the chance that maybe we just got together because we happened to be in the same place at the same time, both of us available and Cindy finally not dating some loser. But there was something more, too. Something between us, where we could just look at each other and understand things.
By the time we got together, we’d been seeing each other every day, though technically we were still just friends. After work, we’d go to the river and I’d fish for bass, the water sleepy and slow that time of year, and Cindy would sit along the edge on a big rock and either read or sometimes just stretch out and watch me fish. And one day, she walked out to the middle of the river, stumbling a little over the round and algae-covered rocks. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me, and well, I was done.
The following spring, I tell Marie, Cindy found out she was pregnant, and two weeks after that, she showed up at Lincoln’s with two suitcases, and that started the happiest time of my life, her standing at my doorstep. I cooked for her, set up pillows beneath her legs to elevate her swollen feet when they bothered her. I rubbed cocoa butter across her growing abdomen, along the widening sides, the belly button that eventually bulged out. What a miracle it was, to watch her body transform as the weeks passed. Sometimes, I would press gently into Cindy’s belly, and the baby would push back, like she felt me out there in the world, like she wanted me to know it.
I have to go quickly through the part where Cindy and Finch and me are driving home and the deer jumps into the passenger side and we roll and roll. The funeral, too, although I tell Marie what Mrs. Judge said about it being my fault Cindy was dead. And then I tell about the nightmares and what happened at the diner before me and Cindy got together, and also about Child Protective Services coming to the house with a police officer and hauling Finch out the door without so much as a warning.